Agora Media Group Innovation Blog

That is what Adam Hartung proclaims in an article on Forbes.

Customers are often locked in your solution and proposition and customers often don’t advice beyond short term business tactics and enhancements which are advantageous for their needs.
The two examples given in the article are clear that customers have other objectives than the suppliers, and this difference can be fatal when it comes to adapting and thriving in fast-changing environments.

Mr. Hartung concludes the focus on competitors instead of customers, nicely in two paragraphs:

To succeed you have to obsess about competitors. And not just about traditional ones, but about fringe ones as well. What customers won’t tell you, the market will, through competitive activity.[...]

[...]Leaders can move beyond surviving and enter the world of thriving only if they obsess about their competition. Watch the competitors that grow, and watch the competitors that don’t grow, and understand why. Look at how customers behave, not at what they say, and see what tests they are undertaking with competitors–especially with fringe competitors with alternative solutions. See what revenues are shifting to other, often emerging, competitors, even if they’re very small. If you want to remain viable, your competition will give you more insight than all the strategic customer councils in the world.

Both groups represent different goals, competitive intelligence is much more suitable for moulding and planning long term strategies than customers can provide you.
Closely watching the competitors is an objective way of analysis, where self-preservation -by customers- is not the first key-objective and peril.
Acquired customers are a great source when it comes to retention, product enhancement, customer satisfaction and so on.
It’s a refinement that concerns internal versus external, short-term versus long-term.
In the end it all revolves around customers, be it yours or someone else’s that will give you -by action- the intelligence to thrive.

What’s your opinion, is it all wrong or subject to refinement?